If you're the mother who was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone aloud to your child on the LNER train from London to Edinburgh yesterday, one of my grown up children was listening and says you did the voices brilliantly❤️🥹
They said I couldn’t do it.
They said it would’ve happened by now.
They told me to give up, to move on, to admit defeat.
I’m here today to tell you: never give up on your dreams.
@jk_rowling Pat: Its someone pretending to be from the Balmoral...
Strike: Right?
Pat: They say you graffitied a bust.
Strike: Oh yeah, I did that actually.
@jk_rowling just finished the Hallmarked Man.
I cried on three occasions;
- Strike's christmas present for Robin.
- Strike and Robin's restored friendship in the Land Rover.
- Rokeby's heartfelt plea to know his son.
@jk_rowling Meanwhile, in my hometown of Umeå, I spent all of yesterday walking around and listening to The Hallmarked Man.
I went into a dodgy pub for a drink… and what do I see there!?
Definitely not a nef, and not made of silver, but still… serendipity?
When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that ‘woman’ is a concept men can embody at will.
In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK's Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it's possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn't a material fact. These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue.
I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women's and girls' rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don't want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men?
I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it's a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They're not repeating it because it's true - they know full well it's not true - but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree. The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you're one of the Godly, and an exorcist's weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry.
Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions (though we can quibble whether they're actually liberal at all, given the draconian authoritarianism that seems to have engulfed so many). Gender ideology could give medieval Catholicism a run for its money when it comes to punishing heretics, so isn't it common sense to keep your head down and recite your Hail Mulvaneys?
But before we start feeling too sorry for any cowed and fearful TWAWites who're TERFy on the sly, let's not forget what a high proportion of them have willingly snatched up pitchforks and torches to join the inquisitional purges. Call me lacking in proper womanly sympathy, but I find the harm they've enabled and in some cases directly championed or funded - the hounding and shaming of vulnerable women, the forced loss of livelihoods, the unregulated medical experiment on minors - tends to dry up my tears at source.
History is littered with the debris of irrational and harmful belief systems that once seemed unassailable. As Orwell said, 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' Gender ideology may have embedded itself deeply into our institutions, where it's been imposed, top-down, on the supposedly unenlightened, but it is not invulnerable.
Court losses are starting to stack up. The condescension, overreach, entitlement and aggression of gender activists is eroding public support daily. Women are fighting back and winning significant victories. Sporting bodies have miraculously awoken from their slumber and remembered that males tend to be larger, stronger and faster than females. Parts of the medical establishment are questioning cutting healthy breasts off teenaged girls is really the best way to fix their mental health problems.
One seemingly harmless little white lie - Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men - uttered in most cases without any real thought at all, and a few short years later, people who think of themselves as supremely virtuous are typing 'yes, rapists' pronouns are absolutely the hill I'll die on,' rubbing shoulders with those who call for women to be hanged and decapitated for wanting all-female rape crisis centres, and furiously denying clear and mounting evidence of the greatest medical scandal in a century.
I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame.
As a gay man, to be a “traitor” to these idiots, I would have had to have been on their team to begin with. LGB stands for sexualities and the TQ+ stands for mental disorders and narcissistic identities. I can’t betray a group I was never a part of.
Being excluded from spaces where women and girls are undressing does not mean men are forced to live in a cupboard under the stairs.
You appear to believe you own me. I got myself where I am and paid my bills with my earnings, you insufferable, entitled prick.
Congratulations to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights. Without you, there’d be no images like this.
@againstgrmrs I've said it before and I'll say it again: the demonisation by trans activists of gay adults fighting to halt the medicalisation and castration of gay kids has been appalling. I'll always have your back, as you've had mine.